"Mommy, why did he break our house?"

Just when it seems nothing too exciting is going on, something does. This past week the kids and I witnessed our landlord/next door neighbor hooking up a chain to one of the many trees on the hill behind our house. From experience, I knew this meant he would be hooking the other side of that chain to his Bobcat tractor and pulling the tree down. Like I said... I've seen it before. It all started when this happened. Then another came down only 8-10 feet from the kids room.

Sometime later, our landlord decided another tree should come down (deliberately), before it decided to fall in its own time. It was great fun as we all headed outdoors to watch him pull it down (in case it came toward our house again). And it came down great... no problems!

So when we saw him hooking up another tree one day last week, I knew how it would play out. At some point he would stop by and mention that he was going to pull a tree down and would feel better if we weren't in the house. We would get our shoes on, grab the stroller and head somewhere safe.

Well, that's exactly what happened... only his wife called instead. She wanted to make sure the kids weren't napping already or something. We gathered up shoes, stroller and camera and headed out to the "safe spot".

I snapped this just before he started pulling. You see the two trees on the left side of the pic? Take a look at the one on the right... about 1/3 of the way down the photo. You should be able (I hope) to see a chain around the tree, with the rest moving down from the tree at a diagonal. That's the tree.

This is 4 seconds later... literally. I checked the time stamp on my computer. I wish I had a pic of the roots... they broke right off at the ground. This tree was dead!

And this is 1 second beyond the other. Sadly, for time stamp's sake, I don't have the next picture of it laying on our deck! I'd love to know what the total time was... but it was 5 seconds from beginning to here. Unfortunately... once it crashed onto our deck, Tornado started crying hysterically. Loud noises are never good, and because I never expected the tree to fall so fast, I wasn't preparing him. I thought it would take several minutes still. I thought I'd take a few pictures... talk to the kids... take another picture or so... talk to the kids. Nope. 5 seconds... whole things was over.

Here is the view as we enter the back deck from the side of the house. Yes, that was our picnic table. All that "snow" you see is the shattered glass. The first thing our super-kind landlord said to me as I rounded the bend of our house was... "I owe you a new picnic table".

Other than feeling badly that he has so much work to do to fix the deck...

...really I find the whole thing pretty funny.

It helps that the solar panels didn't get hurt... that would have been very sad for My Beloved. But since they are ok... and no one was hurt. It's no biggie!

Still... hours later, Tornado was asking, "Mommy, why did he break our house?" No amount of explaining seemed to make the question go away. I think he was still so excited about it that asking the same question over and over and over again was the only way to keep talking about it.

Labels: As it happens..., Have to Laugh

posted by ~Babychaser~ @ 7:06 AM